If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (52 page)

I showed her a letter I had found in Antonina’s boxes. The letter was written by Maria Klyugman, the Red Army surgeon, another of the accused. The letter is the only written record of the trial to have come to light; in it Maria names the accused and their accusers, and three others.

Olga asked to see the letter, read it and seemed shaken. It had always been rumoured that something like this happened, she said, ‘but no one knew for sure.’ She went for another smoke.

‘But there were no traitors in the camp,’ she said when she returned to the room. ‘Not that I knew of. In the camp we were strong you see – us Soviet girls,’ and she recalled one October revolution day when Lyusya Malygina ‘jumped down from her bunk and danced’, and a French woman
sang an aria
. ‘Yevgenia Lazarevna would always come round and say: “Happy holiday girls.” She always encouraged us to celebrate in any way we could.’

In autumn 1944 Rosa Thälmann arrived in the camp. She was the wife of the famous German communist Ernst Thälmann, shot dead in Buchenwald in August that year. ‘So Yevgenia Lazarevna said: “Let’s bake her a cake.” And we really did. We were given 25 grams of margarine at the weekend and a spoon of jam and somehow we mixed it with bits of bread and made this cake and decorated it with flowers that we stole from the grave of Binz’s dog.’

In the summer of 1943 Suhren made a new rule that on Sundays all prisoners must march, not stroll, down the Lagerstrasse in order to restore discipline and order, lost since Langefeld’s departure. The Soviets – banned until then from appearing on the Lagerstrasse on Sundays – were also instructed to march.

‘Our own beautiful blondes saw it as a chance to show off,’ said Olga,
laughing. ‘They ironed their dresses by putting them under their mattresses and made themselves look smart. They even washed their hair using coffee. Then we all marched out as if on military parade and everyone stared.’

Dagmar Hajkova, the leading Czech communist, gave a more dramatic account in her post-war testimony. The march happened on a very hot day, she said. ‘The whole camp’s surface was covered with black cinders. It was as if the camp was wrapped in a mourning veil. Several thousand women in striped rags, with wooden shoes or on bare feet, were marching in ranks of five in thick clouds of black dust.’

The women were told to sing German songs. Some Czechs tried to sing Czech national songs instead, but the guards stopped them so they were silent. ‘
Only the proletarians
[asocials] carried on singing,’ said Dagmar, ‘mostly popular songs about blue eyes, red lips and kisses. It was a sorry picture. All young girls, almost unlike human beings – greasy, barefoot or in wooden shoes, their steps stumbling due to tiredness. It wasn’t a real march at all. Some were limping. Everyone was longing for the end.’ Then suddenly a roar broke out across the camp and everyone turned to see the 500 Soviet women march to the main square, lined up according to height and marching in ranks of five in perfect military parade step.

Standing on the kitchen steps the commandant and his staff were watching, stunned. From the camp square, thousands of eyes of imprisoned women from all European peoples were watching the Soviet women too. When they arrived in the centre of the square, they all began to sing a Red Army fighting song. They sang with clear and loud voices, one song after another. They walked into the centre of the square, young faces, shaven heads as a sign of shame, but with their heads up high: and everyone froze on the spot. They walked on as if they were parading on Red Square in Moscow, not in a national-socialist concentration camp.

What Dagmar Hajkova says happened next seems like wishful thinking on her part. The other prisoners made a guard of honour for the Soviets, she claims. ‘Thousands of hands applauded them. The Red Army soldiers sang the Partisans’ Song, and now the whole camp joined in.’ Olga Golovina had talked more simply of the Soviet girls ‘showing off’.

Nevertheless, the SS were taken aback and didn’t react for some minutes. ‘Binz stood and waited for the signal,’ said Hajkova. ‘They hadn’t experienced such daring behaviour. It took them a while to chase them back to the barracks. We weren’t allowed to leave the barracks again that Sunday. But we didn’t receive a mass punishment. The SS didn’t report this event to Berlin. They didn’t want them to know. And we never had to march on a Sunday again.’

Chapter 18

Doctor Treite

T
he Red Army women need not have feared being sent to the Siemenslager. Under the terms of their imprisonment they couldn’t work outside the walls; nor could they do munitions work, as they were likely to protest. Siemens didn’t want troublemakers at their plant, which by the summer of 1943 was performing exceptionally well. So pleased was the Siemens boss Rudolf Bingel with output at Ravensbrück that in 1943
he donated
100,000 Reichsmarks to Himmler’s ‘circle of friends’.

Since the factory opened a year before it had tripled in size, and more than 600 women now worked twelve-hour shifts, including a night shift. They made copper coils, switches, microphones, telephone equipment and condensers, which poured off conveyor belts to be sent to the finishing shop and then packed up and loaded onto railway wagons. The women had little idea what these parts were used for. ‘We thought, is this for a plane or for a gun?’ said the Bulgarian inmate Georgia Tanewa.

A railway network had been laid through the woods, linking the Siemens plant to a jetty on the lake and to the main line running through Fürstenberg. Plans were also being made to link the plant to a young offender institution for delinquent girls which was situated close by, in an area of woodland known as Uckermark. Run by the judiciary police, not the SS, the Uckermark Youth Camp, as it became known, held up to 400 adolescents said to be morally or sexually depraved. Prisoners in Ravensbrück said the girls had mostly committed petty offences: many had just been thrown off trains for not having a ticket. Young and strong, they were bound to make good slave
labourers, so Siemens had struck a deal to build a factory outpost at the
Youth Camp
too. After a year at Ravensbrück the Siemens management and SS were working hand in hand. Important men in civilian clothes appeared at the plant, including the top Siemens director Gustav Leifer, another member of the SS, who visited Fritz Suhren in his camp headquarters, while Suhren had visited the Siemens headquarters in Berlin. Otto Grade, the Ravensbrück plant director, was on excellent terms with Suhren, and was often seen around the main camp. Working under him were scores of Siemens civilian staff – technicians, managers and instructors.

Not everything at the plant had run smoothly. The management had clamped down on contacts between civilian staff and prisoners. An Austrian-Czech communist, Anni Vavak, employed at Siemens, had tried to talk to the civilian staff to alert them to the atrocities. ‘
I absolutely wanted
to get in touch with these civilians,’ said Anni. ‘I wanted these German workers to pass on what I told them so people in Germany would know what happened at the camp.’

A handful of the senior managers seemed decent. One Siemens man used to hide a newspaper under his table so the prisoners might find it, and another civilian offered to post prisoners’ letters. However, most Siemens civilians were ‘coarse’ and were ‘repulsed’ by the prisoners, so Anni had failed to win any over. Most were also convinced Nazis. The head of the
Spulerei
(winding department), Lombacher, was ‘both a Nazi and a sadist’, and he was not alone. Even the kinder ones changed their behaviour after new directives from the Siemens management, barring all contacts. One such directive came into Anni’s hands, ‘which I screwed up in my fist and told myself that the political prisoners rose way above this rabble’.

Anni didn’t say what the notice said, but we know the company thinking on fraternising from another management note, which is on file. Frustrated at a stoppage caused by a shortage of parts, the manager complained: ‘
It is incomprehensible
that prisoners should in a sense be paid for warming themselves and resting in our nice clean production facilities. Feelings of sympathy are inappropriate in these cases and everyone must constantly suppress them in himself.’

Siemens managers had also complained about ‘feelings of sympathy’ shown by Hertha Ehlert, one of the first women guards at Siemens, who liked to give food to the prisoners, and had therefore been removed and sent by the SS
to work at the death camp
of Majdanek in Poland. Ehlert was replaced at Siemens by Christine Holthöwer, who was known as a beater, and a spy for Ludwig Ramdohr.

As the Siemens camp grew, new guards were recruited from Siemens Berlin staff. Lured here with promises of more money and food, some were
homesick and hated the place. ‘
I wanted to go back
straight away,’ said one woman, ‘but they said I had signed so I had to stay. It was hard at first. For the first eight days I couldn’t swallow a thing. But then you get hardened to it.’

The declining health of the prisoners, caused by the appalling camp diet and overcrowded blocks, meant a high turnover of Siemens workers, but there was nothing to be done about it, as under the contract between Siemens and the SS, the SS had sole responsibility for the women’s food and accommodation. As one Siemens official put it: ‘
As the housing
and food were assured by the camp all measures on our part were superfluous.’ Nor did Siemens have to care about workers’ health: under its contract with the SS the company had the right to strike off its lists any sick women, along with any unsuitable women who had misbehaved or failed to meet the quota. Otto Grade, the plant director, made sure the number of rejected prisoners was always noted on his monthly reports to Berlin, as well as the number of new replacements.

The workers’ health was also damaged by the long march to and from the factory that they underwent four times a day. The distance from the gates to the wire of the Siemens plant was less than a mile, but for the prisoners it felt far longer. With ill-fitting wooden clogs they marched first across the wet sand or bog beside the lake, then plunged into woods and up the steep hill as feet sank into soil and slid on wet leaves. In snow and ice the women slipped and fell.

The Siemens workers left the camp – after standing for
Appell
– with only their coffee for breakfast. ‘We reached Siemens frozen and began working with stiff fingers, stomach always empty, head sleepy,’ said Anni Vavak. To make matters worse, when the prisoners arrived, the civilians were often eating their breakfast. ‘
Under our eyes
, knowing we were starved, they took out all their delicious food, which we didn’t even know the name of any more,’ recalled Minny Bontemps, another Siemens woman.

On return for lunch the women just had time to grab a bowl of watery soup of swedes and two or three potatoes, but the push for quotas meant that the guards would chase them out before they’d eaten, driving them back up the hill shouting: ‘Hands down, gobs shut, idiots, filthy good-for-nothing bitches!’ At the end of the day, the exhausted women walked back again, and as dark fell the Siemens night shift set off, working through from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. without even a slice of bread.

Siemens women suffered severely from boils, swollen legs, diarrhoea and TB, but the long hours of repetitive tasks, and constant pressure to meet the quota, produced an illness of its own: nervous twitching. ‘
After three months
the women were a bundle of nerves and couldn’t go on,’ said Irma Trksak, an Austrian-Czech prisoner. ‘Many started wanting to dig
sand or even empty ditches.’ Those with these nervous twitches were soon listed as unsuitable and quickly removed from the lists.

Selma van de Perre (née Velleman, and known in the camp as Margareta van der Kuit),
^*
a Dutch prisoner who arrived at Siemens the following year, said many women at the plant had nervous breakdowns. ‘
It was one of the
dreadful things – the madness. I have often seen it – it started like this’ – and she made her eyes flicker and twitch. ‘Then the strange laughing started.’

One of those afflicted was a young Dutch woman called Jacqueline Van der Aa, who arrived with her mother Bramine. Mother and daughter came from a high-class family; they had been arrested for helping the Dutch resistance, said Selma. ‘They were perfectly all right when they arrived. Jacqueline was beautiful, with gorgeous long hair, but she was shaved – the only one of our group. She cried and cried.’ A few months after starting at Siemens, Bramine died of typhus after drinking the water out of one of the taps at the plant. Then Jacqueline began to show signs of nerves. ‘I noticed it was often those from good families who couldn’t cope. They weren’t used to the conditions,’ said Selma, who remembered many other cases including a woman called Benno Hoenicke. ‘She was a solicitor in the ministry of food before the war. I remember she stole my bread one day. Then she started twitching. It was a phenomenon. I could always see the beginning of it.’

I asked what happened to them. ‘Oh, the guards noticed quite quickly and they were sent back to the camp and killed.’

As Selma observed, the killing of the ‘mad’, and of other ‘useless mouths’,
had never halted
. Lethal injection had continued in the
Revier
. After the big transports which took women to their deaths at Bernburg in early 1942, smaller selections were held from time to time; trucks came in the night and took away up to fifty women for gassing, probably at Auschwitz.

Details of these smaller death transports, which became know as black transports – or
Himmelfahrt
(‘heaven-bound’) transports – are sparse, but Gerhard Schiedlausky, the camp doctor, revealed at the Hamburg trial a little of how they worked. The
black transports
were disguised as ‘euthanasia’ under the same 14f13 order that governed the Bernburg gassings. The camp doctors gave a medical report on those selected, he said, and the prisoners themselves were required to take an intelligence test to see if they were ‘mad’ or not.